'Wish Santana well - he's going to need it'

There are 777 days left before the 2010 Fifa World Cup kicks off in South Africa - 777 days for new Bafana Bafana coach Joel Santana to prove he was worth the recommendation from departed Carlos Alberto Parreira and the R1,5-million-a-month salary that allegedly goes with the post.

Several top pundits called it as a huge gamble to engage a man without international coaching experience and with a number of sackings on his CV, but, to be fair, every coach who ever made it to the top had to start somewhere.

There will always be a first time in the hot seat for everyone. I don't have a problem with the appointment, for it would be foolish to suggest anything negative when the chances are that Santana could well turn our average football team into a more formidable unit come 2010.

Hopefully he is not going to have a fit when he gets to work with his new charges in a few weeks' time to prepare for the tough Nations Cup qualifier away to Nigeria.

People have over the years had this misguided notion that South African footballers have a lot in common with their Brazilian counterparts, so Santana may arrive on our shores highly expectant of the quality at his disposal.

I agree there were signs of similarities in the era of the Jomo Sonos, the Ace Ntsoelengoes, the Teenage Dladlas, the Bernard Hartzes, the Yazeed "Joey" Lawrences, to name but a few, but to even remotely suggest that our current crop are on a par with Brazil's best is ludicrous.

It is no secret that the strength and subsequent success of Brazilian football had been built on the basis of outscoring the opposition.

The five-times world champions never boasted about their rearguard and seldom, if ever, produced a goalkeeper of note.

Those were not the main elements of their play. What mattered in each game was that they get one goal more than their opponents.

And herein lay the madness of Parreira's defence-minded philosophy. At the 2006 World Cup, he rendered his side toothless as a result of his defensive/counter-attacking strategies. It backfired, so one would have thought that the respected mentor would have explored new avenues with a Bafana side glaringly worse in defence than in going forward.

The 3-0 win against Paraguay in a friendly match apart, Parreira's results were not earth-shattering given the high expectations of a nation desperate for a competent football team by 2010.

Now we are told that his successor too favours defensive tactics, with the emphasis on keeping the shape at the back before launching an offensive through attacking midfielders.

So wonder no more why Parreira picked the man with the exotic surname for the plum job of coaching the hosts of the prestigious competition in 2010.

Let's give the guy a positive welcome, though, and best wishes - because he is going to need it.

And perhaps someone up there should tell him that if he does achieve history as the man who took Bafana past the group stage for the first time, it would have had nothing to do with the fact that he was born on Christmas day.

The football gods just don't care much for the sentiments of romantic coaches. Coaching Bafana is a massive challenge, and even more so with the ominous threat of becoming the first hosts not to qualify for the knockout stages of a World Cup.

Heaven forbid, and I think the time is ripe for the best footballers of this country to step up to the plate and perform like the best players of this country.

It's also time for overseas-based stars like Steven Pienaar, Aaron Mokoena, Nasief Morris and Benni McCarthy to strum the same tunes for Bafana which they play so beautifully at club level.

If not, we're going to have a problem here because in South Africa 777 days is a lifetime to last in the Bafana dugout.

A question for the men in the corridors of power: why, when South African football's development was in the past mapped out by Germany and just about every coach with connections to the national body were asked to cut their teeth in the rigid technical world of German football, is there still this obsession with everything Brazilian? Am I missing something here?